Speedlight Trouble

One of the largest problems I’ve been facing thus far with my own personal studio photography set up has been the inability to trigger my strobes remotely. As just about anyone who has used a camera should know by now, on-camera flash usually results in overexposed, harsh photos that look like they were taken by a point and shoot, no matter how good your camera is. The best way to avoid this look is to get the flash off your camera, put it at a different angle and go to town.

This, however, leads to the problem of how you trigger your flash when the camera doesn’t do it automatically. There are three ways to trigger an off camera flash: a long sync cord, a radio trigger, or a slave function triggered by another flash. Sync cords are the cheapest route, but they are a pain because they are very sensitive and frequently malfunction. And at $50-60 a pop, they aren’t that inexpensive, especially when you figure you have to buy several of them in case one stops working. Radio triggers are the best option for reliability and ease of use, but your options there, as I’ve mentioned before, are to spend about $400 for a set of Pocket Wizards or find a cheap knock off which may or may violate FCC regulations. Alien Bees has a great solution, a transmitter and receiver set will run you only $80, but it only works with Alien Bees or White Lightening strobes.

Which brings me to the third option, slave triggers. This basically means that a strobe can be triggered when another flash goes off. This usually works great, unless you have more than one photographer at an event, in which case competing flashes could cause you some grief.

Most studio strobes have a slave function built into them, and while some speedlights have proprietary radio/slave functions built in, most do not have optical slaves functions. However, for about $35 you can buy an optical slave sensor to attach to the bottom of your speedlight, pair it up with a second light and you’re golden. Except in my case, of course.

After some research, I purchased a Canon 580EX speedlight, which seemed like it would give me the best light, the most flexibility and room for growth, should I invest in additional Canon speedlights down the road. It was a mistake of a purchase – I haven’t been able to use it remotely and it doesn’t give me great results on camera, as was to be expected.

Then I discovered Alien Bees, which although a little more bulky and less portable, will give me more options, easier to use, and have an inexpensive radio trigger. But I still have this expensive speedlight which I’ve now had longer than the B&H return policy of 30 days. So I figured I’d pick up the optical slave attachment, and figured I’d finally get some use out of it. Guess again.

The optical slave attachement didn’t work on my Canon speedlight. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, and thought maybe the attachment was defective. So I slapped it on an old speedlight that we have at work, bingo, flash so bright I was seeing a colored rectangle in front of my eyes for the next hour. So the attachment wasn’t defective. So I go home, try it on the Canon speedlight, using my camera’s built in flash as the trigger, and it works! Excellent, so I must have been doing something wrong before, right?

So I pull out my Alien Bee, fire it up, hit the flash…and the speedlight doesn’t fire. Shit. Switch the attachment to the borrowed speedlight, and it works. Back on the Canon, doesn’t work. For some reason, the Canon does not recognize the Alien Bee flash as a trigger. RAH!

I am very frustrated with the Canon speedlight at this point. It seems to me that their built in proprietary firmware doesn’t want me to use anything but Canon products. I wouldn’t have thought that would have extended to flash light frequency or whatever, but it appears to be the case. Gar.

Anyone need an overprived speedlight?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Photography, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.